I've been doing some research on various independence referenda over history, just out of my own interest to see if I can glean anything interesting from them before the Scottish vote on the 17th, and I happened to come across a set of votes in various Polynesian Islands over independence from the US in 1975.
However while analysing the data I noticed something odd, the number of 'discounted ballot papers' from this table here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Territory_of_the_Pacific_Islands_status_referendum,_1975, for all of the different territories is exceptionally high.
For example in the Marshall Islands it is 29%!!! This is in comparison to normal levels of void ballot papers of <1%.
And in Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei and Yap it comes to a 33% void rate.
In the Palau independence vote the number of void or blank ballot papers is a staggering 47%
What was it about this election that led to such a high voiding rate? Where the populace illiterate, or not instructed correctly on how to fill out the ballot paper correctly?
I am not sure anyone can answer for certain why such a high percentage of ballots were voided without some level of conjecture; certainly one if not all of these challenges were present; illiteracy, confusing ballots (everyone had to vote yes/no for each potential change of status, not just yes/no for the ones they felt most strongly for), some level of election tampering, and the exclusion of votes from outer islands that did not arrive on time.
It is perhaps useful to keep in mind that this referendum itself would not have changed the status of the Trust Territories of the Pacific; just a few days after the referendum, fifty six delegates of the Congress of Micronesia met on Saipan to hold a constitutional convention. There was a certain amount of pressure on the convention to come up with a workable constitution as the Marianas Islands had already broken off to negotiate its status as a Commonwealth within the US. At this time Palau and the Marshall Islands were both threatening to do the same thing, setting the stage for some high theater at the convention as Palau made a series of demands it knew could not be met, and thereafter went off to negotiate its own status with the US over the course of the next twenty years.
A pretty detailed account of the Trust Territories gradual break up can be found in "Strangers in their own Land" by Francis Hezel, or "Making Micronesia" by David Hanlon.
The 1975 Referendum was not the beginning or the end of the Trust Territories and the results of the Referendum is not indicative at all at what ended up happening to the various Micronesian Islands.